Hillary Clinton Aims to Capture the Cool

On Super Tuesday of the bitter 2008 Democratic primary campaign, a group of Barack Obama supporters riding the New York City subway noticed Audrey Gelman wearing a Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign button on her jacket.

They berated Ms. Gelman, then a junior staff worker on the Clinton campaign, for backing a candidate standing in the way of the first black president. At another point, the button invited mocking inquiries at a Lower East Side cafe as to whether Ms. Gelman was a Republican.

Now a 27-year-old public relations consultant with one foot in Democratic politics and the other in New York’s hipper-than-thou fashion, arts and music scene, Ms. Gelman is feeling more confident in her Clinton accessories this time around. “If you go to a party in Williamsburg or Bushwick now and wear a Hillary pin,” she said, “people are going to be like, ‘Right on.’ ”

“Cool Kids for Hillary.” You may be able to imagine it on a campaign button, but would any of them wear one? Whereas Mr. Obama’s 2008 candidacy organically prompted excitement on college campuses, the country’s skinny-jean citadels and celebrity hangouts, the candidate Clinton seems to be trying awfully hard to be down with the in crowd.

“Say you’ll Bey on Team #Hillary2016, too” read a May 15 tweet on Mrs. Clinton’s official account above an article in Marie Claire (where Ms. Gelman is a contributing editor) that was headlined “Beyoncé just publicly showed her support for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

Then there’s the Brooklyn Heights campaign headquarters. “Brooklyn U.S.A. How can you beat that?” Mrs. Clinton asks in a meet-the-neighbors web video — complete with a precious faux-handwriting font — that captures her greeting adoring Brooklynites. (Never mind that this is one of the borough’s more-staid neighborhoods.)

Ms. Gelman, who called the former secretary of state “a feminist icon and a cultural icon,” has sought to lift Mrs. Clinton’s cultural cred. On the day Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy, Ms. Gelman said that approving Instagram messages poured in from the singer Ciara, the stars of the raunchy millennial comedy “Broad City” and her best friend and “Girls” creator Lena Dunham. (“My new tramp stamp,” Ms. Dunham wrote under the campaign logo.)

There have also been endorsements from Katy Perry, 50 Cent and America Ferrera, the star of TV’s “Ugly Betty.” On Thursday evening, Mrs. Clinton replied “Back at you” to the singer Kelly Clarkson, who called herself a “fan of Hillary.”

But in campaign appearances, Mrs. Clinton has targeted voters on the opposite side of the cool-kid spectrum. On Monday, she stood before leatherbound classics and a ceramic life-size dog in the Mason City, Iowa, living room of Dean Genth and his husband, Gary Swenson.

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Audrey Gelman supports Hillary Clinton.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

“People really got to see a personable, down-to-earth, approachable Hillary Clinton that I think a lot of people don’t realize exists,” Mr. Swenson said after the event, adding that she was “really interested in what the heartland of America and what America in general is interested in.”

The next day, Mrs. Clinton sat for a round-table discussion about small businesses inside a Cedar Falls, Iowa, bicycle shop. With the clean-cut owner of Goldie’s Ice Cream Shoppe on her right, Mrs. Clinton put on her super-folksy accent and stated, again, “I’m running for president because everyday Americans and their families need a champion.”

And yet, Mrs. Clinton would love for young trendsetters to champion her cause and to replicate Mr. Obama’s success at converting his cultural currency among young voters into hard votes.

The campaign argues that she enjoys their widespread support, though Democratic Party operatives say that has more to do with the increasingly liberal positions she has taken than any excitement about her per se.

“Obama was new,” the actor Steve Buscemi said on a recent afternoon as he took a break from filming a scene for a television show on Mott Street. He called Mrs. Clinton “formidable” and “amazing” but added, “She’s been around a long time, so we can’t expect her to have the same thing.”

Mrs. Clinton has made efforts to maintain contact with cultural signposts. In 2012, she posed with the singer Lia Ices at Roberta’s, the Bushwick pizzeria housed in a former garage that was all the rage. That same year, she tasted viral Internet fame and liked it.

Stacy Lambe and a friend were at Nellie’s Sports Bar, a popular Washington gay hangout, when they got the idea of writing humorous texts under a photograph of Mrs. Clinton wearing oversize sunglasses and reading her BlackBerry. The resulting Tumblr account, “Texts From Hillary,” turned into an Internet meme of a woman so ice-cold as to be cool. Mrs. Clinton embraced the image, making it her Twitter avatar.

But Mr. Lambe, who now works at “Entertainment Tonight,” said the meme’s momentum and excitement over Mrs. Clinton has abated somewhat since the controversy over her personal email accounts.

Moreover, “there was this cool-kids factor with Obama,” he said, “and I definitely think Hillary didn’t have that.”

There is little doubt that young voters, who are traditionally Democrats, will prefer Mrs. Clinton over the Republican nominee. And one of the most accomplished women in American political history certainly does not care much about the opinions of people whose defining characteristics are the style of their Warby Parker glasses or the origins of their pour-over coffee. But she does care a lot about becoming president.

The question is then whether she can get young people excited about her candidacy. A temperature-taking in Washington Square Park was not promising.

“Honestly, I really haven’t seen anything,” said Mckennah Spagnola, 19, a New York University student studying psychology, when asked about her peer group’s response to Mrs. Clinton.

A few feet away, the actress Anne Hathaway and her husband smiled as they watched toddlers interacting with dogs. She politely declined to comment (a former boyfriend of hers who once pledged $50 million to the Clinton Global Initiative pleaded guilty to fraud in 2008) and instead admired a circle of aspiring Broadway stars shouting voice exercises.

While the musical theater set had approving things to say about Mrs. Clinton, Mariah Ramirez, 18, who was in sixth grade in the months before the 2008 presidential election, said, “It’s not cool to support Hillary.” Ms. Ramirez said that while the prospect of a female president was exciting, she supports Senator Bernie Sanders because he has said he would not accept super PAC money.

Apathy may be preferable to some of the ambiguous messages Mrs. Clinton has triggered on the streets around her Brooklyn headquarters, where black-and-white posters popped up in April depicting the former first lady over the words “Secretive” or “Ambitious.”

That’s a far cry from the Hope posters (and subsequent ubiquitous T-shirts) made by the graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, who said he is not going to be making another one for Mrs. Clinton.

“I was interested in Obama in 2008 because his stated positions at the time made him seem like a subversive delivery vehicle for progressive principles I believe in,” Mr. Fairey wrote in an email. “Since then, I’ve realized that the corrupt nature of the system itself, with current campaign finance structure and the stranglehold corporations have on government, limits the kind of candidates that will make it into the system and narrows the spectrum of what’s available in our near non-Democracy.”

Try putting that on a T-shirt.

On a recent afternoon, in front of St. Ann’s, a private school across the street from the Clinton headquarters, Adrian Briscoe, 42, paused from chatting with the actress and Brooklyn Heights native Jennifer Connelly to discuss Mrs. Clinton’s decision to base her campaign nearby.

“Do I seem excited?” he asked. He did not.

Neither did Stewart Gerard and Jessica Mazza, who walked out of Glasserie, a trendy restaurant in Greenpoint that evening, to smoke a cigarette in front of a red retro pickup truck. Ms. Mazza, 25, an aspiring filmmaker and artist, said she wished Elizabeth Warren would get in the race.

Mr. Gerard, 32, a production designer, insisted that while he was “down with Hillary,” he worried that young people wouldn’t come out to vote for her, as he had seen none of the enthusiasm Mr. Obama had generated in 2008. He added with a touch of nostalgia, “I wish I could vote for Obama for a third term.”